Smartest Decisions Campaign

Campaign Creative

This campaign ran from 2022-2023, and was our debut of the Nerds on a national stage. In the first launch in 2022, our media plan included significant testing across both known and new channels and media types to see how this new messaging strategy and platform would resonate. The results informed each subsequent campaign launch through 2023.

Developing the Nerds — their casting, wardrobe, demeanor, when and where to use them — was a focus of mine, with the goal of making them iconic and central to our brand expression. The visual toolkit we built for this campaign has been refined and tweaked over the years based on testing performance, and continues to drive strong performance for NerdWallet brand campaigns and sponsorships.

The idioms that inspired the film creative (up in the air, out of the woodwork, on the fence, etc) were all shot practically and enhanced in post, which made for deliciously entertaining tension between the real and surreal. It's my favorite kind of shoot, and I think keeps the work from veering into "oddvertising". I'm also a total nerd for practical fx (see below for the mechanics behind that rigged collapsing table).